Tea at Trianon: Isaac Newton and the Great Pyramid

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, January 4, 2021

Isaac Newton and the Great Pyramid

In the past there was often a huge overlap between science (alchemy) and the occult. From Smithsonian:

As Peter Dockrill reports for Science Alert, many of Newton’s unpublished notes concerning alchemy, occult matters and the biblical apocalypse only resurfaced after his death in 1727. In the British scientist’s own day, church leaders would have viewed many of his ideas on these subjects as heretical.

“His descendants made sure very few saw the papers because they were a treasure trove of dirt on the man,” Sarah Dry, author of The Newton Papers: The Strange and True Odyssey of Isaac Newton’s Manuscripts, told Wired in 2014. “… His papers were bursting with evidence for just how heretical his views were.”

Newton was arguably the most significant figure of the 16th- and 17th-century Scientific Revolution. He formulated the three laws of motion that form the basis of modern physics, discovered that white light is composed out of light from different colors and helped develop calculus, among many other accomplishments.

Per the Observer, Newton began studying the pyramids in the 1680s. At the time, he was in self-imposed exile at his family home, Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire, recovering from an attack on his work by Robert Hooke, a scientific rival and fellow member of the early scientific institution the Royal Society. The notes are burned around their edges—damage attributed to Newton’s dog, Diamond, knocking over a table and toppling a candle. (Read more.)